Unpopular opinion? I actually like the new design

13 days ago by gedaliyah to c/firefox

I've been using vertical tabs for a while, and I do think that the round icons are 1: better suited to the design of the majority of favicons, and 2: offer a quicker visual separation at a glance. It's easier to distinguish between tabs.

If you prefer horizontal tabs, the rounded tabs with a light stroke are even more stark. Firefox has long had a problem with the visual language of the tabs. It has been hard to clearly distinguish between active and background tabs. If you were not already familiar with the color scheme, and someone showed you a window with two tabs, you'd have to make a wild guess to know which was the active tab. Chrome for example represents this by connecting the active tab to the window view - immediately clear. The old Firefox tabs were ambiguous because they didn't connect, and they also weren't clearly separated. This design makes a clear commitment.

The new app icons are gorgeous. The design looks more coherent across the app. It manages to be modern and clean, while presenting a characteristic personality. For too long, Firefox has been chasing trends and aiming for a middle that doesn't exist. Firefox is different and should look different. I think it's much better to make a visual statement that not everyone will love than to have no perspective at all.

Some people have railed against the new default theme. It's not for everyone, but there are 1000s of official and user-created themes to choose from. I have been using a custom theme for ages precisely because the old default theme was ugly.

A small addition, I use Firefox as my default PDF viewer. The new viewer has a few minor improvements and fixes one or two past missteps. I'm sure folks will (rightly) say there are better options for a PDF viewer, but it meets my needs.

badgermurphy 19 points 13 days ago

I think debating on this subject at all is "not seeing the forest for the trees". All of this crap is visual theming. It's preposterous to me that all these visual changes aren't already exposed to the theming engine of Firefox, which would make this and multiple previous nearly identical debates in Firefox's past into non-events. It also would have prevented these changes from alienating more and more of their now frankly cratering user base.

Whether you like it or not, some don't. Some can't because of diminished contrast and visual delineation. Firefox can't afford to lose ever more market share by continuing to focus on unrequested features while ignoring long-standing widely requested improvements. Nearly everyone that uses Firefox picked it specifically for one or more specific reasons. Mozilla ought to consider that fact when making irreversible visual and workflow changes.

The minute another FOSS browsing platform is ready to go, it is over for these guys.

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Ephera 8 points 13 days ago

Counterpoint: They need to get into the news to attract new users. There is no better way to do that than to update the theme or the icon.

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badgermurphy 5 points 12 days ago

If the only objective is to get into the news, their CEO could just say something bombastic on TV.

"There's no such thing as bad publicity," is an antiquated notion in the Information Age. People's lives get destroyed and products have been boycotted out of existence overnight in the modern era.

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Ephera 4 points 12 days ago

But it isn't bad publicity. The reporting on a new theme or icon is generally pretty neutral.

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badgermurphy 2 points 12 days ago

That is true, but again, Firefox users practically all intentionally chose that browser, and often for one or more very specific reasons, not all the same as one another. The articles about it are not what is going to color their opinion of the changes, but their using it and having new problems or challenges that they didnt have before. Of course there will always be those resistant to any change at all, but when you have changes for no clear purpose that also cause these issues, you get dramatically more displeased users, and ones that have a point. On top of this, there is another thing some people that don't mind these cutesy changes don't seem to realize about the people that do. That is that Mozilla has very limited manpower and other resources to commit to any task, so every time they go off and do something that has no clear purpose, it is extra obnoxious that there is no progress on decades old documented bugs, missing features and functionality, and overall lack of focus on the main thing the software is for.

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victorz 2 points 13 days ago

Chrome did the same thing. 👍

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badgermurphy 7 points 12 days ago

Chrome bundled itself with every software you could find like a malware, thats how it gained all that market share so fast.

There was a long period of time where you couldn't install a damn thing without diligently watching out for "checked yes by default" shovelware, and Chrome was the absolute worst offender.

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victorz 1 point 12 days ago

Hm? I was just saying Chrome had also undergone design changes seemingly for the sake of just doing so.

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Creat 3 points 13 days ago

Mozilla ought to consider that fact when making irreversible visual and workflow changes.

I mean I fully agree with the test of your post, but you can literally set a single flag to get the old ui back. Not exactly 'irreversible'. To be fair, we don't know how long that flag is gonna exist, and three probably won't be any (meaningful) work on the old ui either.

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badgermurphy 4 points 12 days ago

Go look at a screenshot of the previous versions of Firefox. All that flag "sets back" is that everything rounded is rectangular again. The ability to create a visual distinction between tabs is gone, and many are unable to use it now due to visual impairment. They changed more than is in those about:config flags.

Also, you're right to suspect it will be temporary. Every single previous change like this with about:config options to revert the change has been temporary, and you can bet this one will be too.

Its super easy for people to be dismissive of detractors when they are not affected by the thing that makes them detractors. It also ignores the larger point of "why the hell isn't ALL of this just Firefox themes in the first place?"

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Ephera 18 points 13 days ago

I doubt that's an unpopular opinion. It's just easier to complain than to praise and we have a lot of techies here who have their specific workflow + customizations that are disrupted by the changeover.

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AwesomeLowlander 23 points 12 days ago

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steelplatedmech 11 points 13 days ago

I like the new design too as a horizontal tabs user.

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rumschlumpel 10 points 13 days ago

I took one look at it and went back to using Tree Style Tabs, it's more compact and allows nesting.

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Peasley 6 points 13 days ago

TST is better than the built in vertical tabs but having to set up a userChrome.css file is kind of a hassle

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ahmedezat_katteb 4 points 13 days ago

The userChrome part is at least a one-time job. Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in about:config, open about:support and click the button next to "Profile Folder", create a folder called chrome there and put userChrome.css inside it.

The catch is that Sync doesn't carry it over, so if you use more than one machine it's worth keeping the file in a dotfiles repo or a synced folder and copying it in after a fresh install.

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webhead 1 point 12 days ago

If you like that try Sidebery. The performance is so much better it's incredible. I used TST for years but the performance is total ass. I didn't like the theme at first but I managed to make it look just like TST without too much effort.

That said I think you do still need that userchrome trick to hide tabs at the top. Annoying that extensions apparently can't do this.

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rumschlumpel 1 point 12 days ago

TST has bad performance? How do you even notice that?

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webhead 2 points 12 days ago

Sluggishness while using it, the insane amount of time it takes to load my tabs at startup, and really when I first installed sidebery I was like wow this runs much better and it made it much more obvious lol. To be fair I run a LOT of tabs but isn't that the case for most people looking for an extension like that? Lol

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rumschlumpel 1 point 12 days ago

I just let most of my tabs unloaded (Auto Tab Discard), otherwise I'd run out of RAM. Is Sidebery unloading them, too? Don't see how else it could deal with that aspect of having a hundred open tabs.

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shellington 4 points 12 days ago

Personally i like the new rounded tabs. A small change and of no practical benefit but nice none the less.

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DrunkenDuckling 1 point 12 days ago

I find the highlighted tab much easier to find now in default dark mode, I consider that a practical benefit

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deadbeef79000 2 points 13 days ago

My beef with the new design isn't the new design. It's the opportunity cost of it.

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grrgyle 2 points 12 days ago

What do you mean?

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kestrel7_7 6 points 12 days ago

They only have so many resources and time. When they focus on updating the way it looks, they aren’t updating something under the hood.

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PaintedSnail 5 points 12 days ago

If you want to attract new users, the visuals are the first thing that people will notice. Better technicals will help to retain users, but if people are immediately turned off by an aging, less intuitive, or even a less "pretty" UI, then none of what's under the hood will matter since they won't even try it in the first place.

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DrunkenDuckling 2 points 12 days ago

IMO because FF already has the technical advantage over Chromium browsers, what it needs now is userbase.

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dance_ninja 1 point 11 days ago

Is Mozilla so small that the folks working on in the browser engine are the same people working on the UI?

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dance_ninja 2 points 11 days ago

I'm warming up to the vertical tabs. Love the rounded design elements and colors.

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timbuck2themoon 1 point 12 days ago

Honestly I keep a dev version installed and the vertical tabs on that- it's very nice.

I'm a little less enthused horizontal but it's not bad. And now I've found a theme called proton that is more like the old dark theme that is just black all around so that's fine too.

In any case, most people either will like it or not care. Lemmy is a pretty negative place overall so I don't take it to be representative of the general population.

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Atlas48 1 point 11 days ago

I just think the firefox UI guys are bad at their job.

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